Confidential Communication Techniques for Virtual Private Social Networks

In this paper, we are concerned with techniques for establishing confidentiality of user-generated content (UGC), shared in centralised and untrusted online social networks (OSNs). We describe how the concepts of secret sharing and steganography can be combined to result in a technique for sending confidential messages, as part of a proposed architecture for a virtual private social network (VPSN). We consider the types of UGC confidentiality threats that the VPSN can mitigate, based on those of a decentralised online social network (DOSN). We also postulate the concept of a virtual distributed online social network (VDOSN) in which a VPSN is established across multiple centralised OSNs.